In a fully remote company setting, there's the question of whether you leave the cadence of your one-on-ones (O3s) open for every team member to choose. Should it be weekly, biweekly, monthly, or Zeus-forbid longer than that?
I have been struggling with that question myself for a long time. I know most managerial advice is to let the cadence up to the team member. Or so it seems.
Here's my thinking. We can all agree that building a professional relationship with your direct reports is important. In a fully remote setting this becomes a challenge. I cannot do my job well if I don't build those relationships. A weekly video call is a high bandwidth approach. It's expensive. But the cadence helps speed up the relationship building process. And in my book, it needs to be the same with everyone in my team. Otherwise I am not giving the same chance to everyone.
Another benefit to having a weekly cadence, is that people remember what they want to talk about. It's not a status update of course. But still, it's beneficial to have a fresh memory of how your work makes you feel weekly rather than monthly or biweekly.
Some argue weekly is too frequent and people don't have what to talk about. I have found the opposite true. It's a muscle. If you don't exercise it often, it atrophies. In fact, with most of my team we struggle to keep it under 30 minutes 😅. I have even developed a technique to help us with that.
I have recently asked my team if they would mind helping me with that. We moved all our O3s to Wednesdays, back-to-back! Moving the meetings to one day helps me create more time to focus on other types of work the rest of the week. Making them back-to-back helps put an artificial constraint. We need to wrap up within 30 minutes, because I have to attend the next O3. This approach means we still have to be disciplined with the last O3 of the day. But that's just one meeting compared to having to do that with 4 or 6. We are seeing great results so far.
So, losing the flexibility to set your own cadence is worth it from my point of view. The question is, is it good for my team members? As with every methodology and approach, I am always open to change my mind. I've done that many times since 2015 when I became a manager of distributed, remote teams. Not getting stuck to methodologies in a dogmatic way, is part of a successful team and company.
I have been struggling with that question myself for a long time. I know most managerial advice is to let the cadence up to the team member. Or so it seems.
Here's my thinking. We can all agree that building a professional relationship with your direct reports is important. In a fully remote setting this becomes a challenge. I cannot do my job well if I don't build those relationships. A weekly video call is a high bandwidth approach. It's expensive. But the cadence helps speed up the relationship building process. And in my book, it needs to be the same with everyone in my team. Otherwise I am not giving the same chance to everyone.
Another benefit to having a weekly cadence, is that people remember what they want to talk about. It's not a status update of course. But still, it's beneficial to have a fresh memory of how your work makes you feel weekly rather than monthly or biweekly.
Some argue weekly is too frequent and people don't have what to talk about. I have found the opposite true. It's a muscle. If you don't exercise it often, it atrophies. In fact, with most of my team we struggle to keep it under 30 minutes 😅. I have even developed a technique to help us with that.
I have recently asked my team if they would mind helping me with that. We moved all our O3s to Wednesdays, back-to-back! Moving the meetings to one day helps me create more time to focus on other types of work the rest of the week. Making them back-to-back helps put an artificial constraint. We need to wrap up within 30 minutes, because I have to attend the next O3. This approach means we still have to be disciplined with the last O3 of the day. But that's just one meeting compared to having to do that with 4 or 6. We are seeing great results so far.
So, losing the flexibility to set your own cadence is worth it from my point of view. The question is, is it good for my team members? As with every methodology and approach, I am always open to change my mind. I've done that many times since 2015 when I became a manager of distributed, remote teams. Not getting stuck to methodologies in a dogmatic way, is part of a successful team and company.